January 2014—present

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bloggin’

One of the hard things about blogging is getting around the idea that your ideas are worth sharing. I used to wonder what people even wanted from publicizing their blogs on their social media sites…were they marketing themselves? This assumption is informed by how I got into blogging: crafting. So many DIY bloggers make a buck on their sites that I internalized money as the point of blogging, especially because, true to 8th-grade, xanga-belittling me, I couldn’t see the point of public journaling. “Why share something before you’re an expert at it?” I thought. This idea couples with other things I’ve done, like destroying the first clothing I ever made. When I was really little, I thought people had a certain number of “good go’s” in them for particular skills, and that practicing used these up.

When I joined tumblr, I was just looking for the easiest platform to share my craft stuff. It was a bridge to a crafting career, a quickly abandoned desire.. Slightly Crafty was a couple years old when I finally posted it to my facebook and had people I know following me. It took me years to start following people other than crafters, which, when it happened, was a great idea. I don’t know why it took so long, but I finally realized that people posted their blogs to their facebooks for very obvious reasons, including community. Making the slowness of this realization especially absurd is that for years I followed and knew commenters on my favorite Livejournal communities, but never made an account; is that just lazily vouyeristic? Or maybe it was self-consciousness that bred hesitation about making a LJ account or following people I knew on tumblr. Silly, because once you do put whatever you feel like out there, you realize what a not-big-deal drop in the ocean it is.

There aren’t many profound realizations in my life, just things that I assume everyone else realized quietly a while ago. I thought the untethered space on WordPress might be a relief, but here where no one follows me, I’m really feeling the emptiness of the room. Sharing is easy when you don’t really think that’s what you’re doing; feeling like you aren’t sharing and wishing you were highlights that anxiety is a tightening belt wound around nothing at all. I like this project, and in a practical sense, it’s working for me.